The Burning Man, page 10
part #2 of Kingdom of the Serpent Series
Hunter cut him off. ‘Let’s not do this in front of your boys.’
The senior officer motioned for the men to leave and Hunter shut the door behind them.
‘What’s all this about?’ the senior officer asked.
Hunter pressed a small black box against the senior officer’s arm. There was a blue flash and the senior officer fell to the ground, unconscious. Hunter held up the box. ‘Government-issue taser. Good for every occasion.’
‘Found your conscience, then?’ Laura said.
‘Funny, when I pictured this in my head it involved you throwing your arms around my neck and smothering me with kisses of gratitude.’
‘Get us out of here and I might just do that. But don’t start thinking it actually means something.’
‘Heaven forfend.’ He dragged the senior officer into the corner, out of sight of the door. ‘Do exactly what I say. We’ll pick up those guards in the corridor and go out through security, where we’ll collect your sword and spear. Then to the vehicle compound where there’s an armoured prisoner transit waiting. Don’t look at me. Don’t talk to me. Act sullenly – should come natural to you lot. We’ve got to move fast. We won’t have much time to cover the trail.’
‘Okay,’ Church said. ‘And thanks.’
‘It’s a job. I always do things to the best of my ability.’
Hunter’s credentials commanded surprising weight as they breezed through security. In the vehicle compound, the guards herded Church, Ruth, Shavi and Laura into the back of the armoured transit and Hunter drove it past the final security checkpoint towards the M4.
‘I’ll expect those kisses shortly,’ Hunter shouted back through the wire mesh between the driver’s cab and the back of the van.
‘It’ll be a life-altering experience. Hope you’re up to it,’ Laura replied.
‘What changed your mind?’ Church asked Hunter.
‘The realisation that I really have no choice.’
‘You are very cool under pressure,’ Shavi said. ‘To walk into the heart of the Enemy’s territory … amazing.’
‘I don’t expect I’ll be able to get away with that again. Next time my charismatic and sexy face will be alongside your mugshots.’
‘Where are we going?’ Ruth asked.
‘To swap vehicles so we can’t be traced. Take a breather, it’s not far.’
Church settled back next to Shavi. ‘You knew something like this was going to happen.’
‘I feel myself awakening, like an orchid in the sun.’ Shavi gave a faint, warming smile. ‘Within me, there are vast depths. Once before I tapped them, and I will do so again.’
‘Do what you can. You’re our seer, Shavi. You can see things that we can’t. We need that advantage.’
Soon after, Hunter pulled the transit into Heston Services where he abandoned it for a brand-new white van.
‘I know they can still track us, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.’ He urged Church to sit in the front with him. Once they were back on the motorway, he said, ‘What’s the strategy?’
‘We need to get to Scandinavia.’ Church described his encounter with Robin Goodfellow. ‘But that’s all I’ve got. Now that we’re officially terrorists I don’t see how we can even get out of the country.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Scandinavia, eh? Can we try to narrow it down to at least a thousand square miles?’
‘I’m working on it.’
Hunter thought for a moment. ‘Maybe we need to cause our own terrorist outrage. Blow somewhere up. Distract the security services.’
‘That’s not what we stand for,’ Church said.
‘I thought we stood for winning.’ Hunter eyed Church with faint bemusement.
‘We’re symbols, too. You know that?’
A thoughtful pause; a nod.
‘We have to be true to what we represent or we’re nothing.’
Hunter didn’t reply, but a faint smile teased his lips all the way to Membury Services where the early afternoon sun was starting to break through a bank of grey clouds. Hunter pulled in next to another identical white van. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you,’ he said to Church.
In the restaurant, Tom was sitting in a corner drinking coffee. He was older than the last time Church had encountered him in the flesh, but he still had the same unmistakable aura of intensity.
Overcome with joy at seeing his old friend again, Church walked quickly to the table. But instead of an emotional reunion, Tom surveyed him with cold eyes flecked with tears.
‘What’s wrong?’ Church asked, shocked.
‘Sit down.’
As Church pulled up a chair, Tom leaned in, his voice trembling with restrained passion. ‘What in heaven’s name have you done?’
Deep in Tom’s eyes there was a haunted intensity that shook Church. ‘I don’t understand—’
Tom gripped Church’s wrist. ‘I should be dead,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘I know it … I can see it with the cursed vision that witch from under the hill gave me. I see two lives running parallel: one here, another where I’m moving across the Grim Lands and into the beyond. I ask you again: what have you done?’
‘I changed reality. To save you, and Niamh and all of the Tuatha Dé Danann.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know if I can explain it. At the time it was like a dream. When I lay in the casket in the Far Lands in the Sleep Like Death, it felt as if I went to another place … where there was a Caretaker … and two other beings who claimed they were close to some higher power.’ The memories were hazy, and the more Church tried to recall them, the more they slipped from his grasp. ‘The Caretaker took me to something he called the Axis of Existence, and he told me that if I shifted it I could change what had happened—’
‘You bloody idiot.’ Tom covered his face, shaking silently. ‘Do you know what it’s like to feel alive and dead at the same time?’
‘I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself—’
‘It’s not just me!’ Tom snapped. ‘You’re not a god. To do such a thing, with no concept of the repercussions—’ He caught himself. ‘Nothing is created. Nothing is destroyed. There is only what is, all connected. To change one thing changes everything.’
Church weighed Tom’s words, the burden of his distress. ‘What have I done?’
‘I don’t know. That’s just it! There is a puzzle on sale in the city – a glass ball encased in a network of string tied to wooden rods. The aim is to remove the glass ball by shifting the rods until a large enough hole appears in the network. But every time you move one rod, the string attached to it shifts another rod, and so on, so that the network continually shifts, confounding any attempts to create a hole. Do you see?’
‘So by altering events to save your life—’
‘The network shifted in other places. Perhaps someone lost their life who never should have. Perhaps something terrible has happened, or is happening now. Perhaps …’ He flapped a weary hand and covered his face again.
‘I only wanted to save you, Tom.’
‘Good intentions in the hands of an idiot are a dangerous weapon.’ He looked deep into Church’s eyes. ‘Nothing else to do now but deal with the situation you’ve given us. Are you up to it?’
‘I’ve kept my head above water so far.’
‘Just. Remarkable, considering you didn’t have me to act as your common sense.’
Church was distracted by the sudden darkening of the sky through the window. The ravens descended on the service station, briefly blotting out the sun.
‘The Morvren,’ Tom said. ‘They follow death and destruction, and supernatural terror.’
‘They appear to be following me.’ Church recalled what he had been told two thousand years earlier about the ravens, symbols of death, following in his wake.
‘I think,’ Tom said, ‘we should not be sitting around debating any longer.’
4
Shavi was oblivious to the cacophonous bird calls that now drowned out the deep drone of the motorway traffic. He had left Hunter and Laura to their flirtatious insulting of each other, and Ruth to a quiet brooding that appeared to have been consuming her since she had left St Paul’s, and made his way beyond the service station perimeter to where he had a view of the tranquil Berkshire countryside.
The struggle Church had set for them was vast and victory unimaginable, but he was convinced of its rightness. He was prepared to risk anything, even his own life, in pursuit of that victory.
At the bottom of a slope that hid him from the service station, he sat cross-legged, no longer feeling the warmth of the sun on his face, or hearing the wind in the copse nearby. Every part of him was focused internally.
A hint of fear, a remembrance of the price he had already paid, and then the familiar taste of iron filings in his mouth. Ahead of him, six feet above the ground, the air grew opaque and then began to steam and bubble. A hole opened up, and after a minute a figure forced its head and shoulders through, a mewling monstrosity being born. Its face was blank, but indentations revealed the location of its eyes and mouth; Shavi was convinced he could see the eyes moving just beneath the silvery caul.
‘Who calls?’ it said with wrenching jaw movements.
‘I do. Shavi, Brother of Dragons.’
‘Again you draw me from the Invisible World?’
‘I need information.’
There was a short pause before it replied, ‘You know the price, Brother of Dragons. A small thing. Only a small thing.’
Shavi remained calm, but inside he felt a ghost of the pain he had suffered the last time he had paid this being with ‘a small thing’. Through his contact with the earth, he reached deeply within himself, feeling for the thin residue of the Blue Fire. It echoed in the darkness of his mind, spoke to him without words.
‘A small thing?’ he said.
‘Just a small thing,’ the construct said nonchalantly.
‘No,’ Shavi said. ‘I am a Brother of Dragons. I am awakening to what that means, despite all the efforts of greater powers to keep me in a deep sleep.’
The construct shrank back. ‘Then there can be no answers for you. The rules—’
‘The rules have changed.’
Shavi quickly caught the construct at the back of its silvery head. The skin moved like mercury beneath his fingers.
‘Stay back!’ it said sharply. ‘This cannot be—’
The words died in its throat as Shavi drove his fingers into one eye socket beneath the caul. The thing shrieked so loudly that Shavi’s ears rang. Blood began to drip from his nose.
The skin split. Beneath it, an eye popped from the construct’s socket. Shavi closed his hand around the gelatinous orb and tore it free.
The construct’s shattering howl threw Shavi back several feet. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will have answers. But first …’
He examined the eye, weighing up what the voice in the Blue Fire had told him. Then he tore off his eye patch and forced the shiny orb into his own gaping socket.
5
‘Where’s Shavi?’ Church called as he ran to the van where Hunter and Laura were watching the flock of ravens settling on all the vehicles. So many flew overhead that it looked as if night was falling early.
From the perimeter of the car park, Shavi walked confidently towards them. They all stopped to stare, recognising a transformation that went beyond his missing eye patch. In the gathering gloom, a faint golden glow emanated from his new eye.
‘What the fuck, Shavster?’ Laura peered into his face and was relieved to see it was still her old friend.
‘Oslo, Norway,’ he said. ‘That is our destination.’
‘Look.’ Ruth indicated steady movement in the fields that bounded the service station. Brutish figures moved close to the ground, approaching on all sides.
‘Redcaps,’ Tom said. ‘They are only the first of many.’
In less than a minute, Hunter had the van racing onto the motorway. The birds followed, turning the sky into a cauldron of seething darkness.
‘The whole bird thing – bit of a giveaway,’ Laura said.
‘The Morvren recognise the currents of reality,’ Tom said. ‘They see convergences that presage a maelstrom.’
Laura eyed him suspiciously. ‘I know you somehow. Old guy, talking bollocks. Or was it just a bad dream?’
‘This is all a bad dream.’ Tom’s glasses caught the light of approaching headlamps in the preternatural dark. ‘Drive faster, now.’ The calm in his voice was somehow more chilling.
‘All right,’ Hunter said as he searched the landscape for any sign of threat, ‘starting to think I made the wrong decision listening to you back in London.’
Shavi began to recount what had happened to him, until his head suddenly rocked forward to his chest, then snapped back. His new eye shimmered a sickly green as he stared at things no one else could see. ‘The air folds and spatters like liquid metal,’ he said in a flat monotone. ‘Shadows falling like rain …’
‘He’s having some kind of vision.’ Ruth grasped Shavi’s shoulders but he was rigid.
Hunter took the slip road for Swindon, then followed a circuitous route to avoid the most built-up areas. Eventually Shavi regained his composure.
‘What were you thinking?’ Laura said. ‘You steal an eye from some supernatural tosser, and then stick it in your own head? There’s a reason why the NHS doesn’t do transplants like that.’
‘I knew there would be a price to pay for the transaction,’ Shavi said with a strained smile, ‘but it is one I can bear.’
‘We thought you were going to have a seizure.’ Ruth brushed his sweat-matted hair away from his forehead.
‘When I focus through that eye, I can see things in the Otherworld. I know things I would never have known otherwise. Things that can help us.’
‘You can see two worlds at the same time?’ Ruth asked.
Shavi nodded.
‘No wonder you keep losing it.’ Laura snorted. ‘Shame. I was starting to like the eye-patch look. Still won’t trust you behind the wheel, though.’
Hunter brought the van to a halt on a country lane. Beyond the hedge there was a high-security fence punctuated with Ministry of Defence warning signs.
‘What are you planning?’ Church asked.
‘That’s RAF Wroughton.’ Hunter stretched, cracked his knuckles. ‘I’m going to commandeer a Hercules Transporter to take us to Norway. It’s a NATO ally. We can bypass all the civilian security clearances.’
‘You can do that?’
‘As long as they haven’t already revoked my security clearance. In which case, I’ll have to steal one.’
‘Remember: you are not simply entering a new country,’ Tom warned. ‘It is a new Great Dominion. New rules, new dangers. The gods are very protective of their territories.’
Chapter Four
TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
1
The world was white. Sky and landscape merged into one horizonless snowy backdrop so that all there was felt enclosed in a glass ball and beyond existed only mystery. They exited down the ramp at the back of the plane where soldiers in parkas struggled to unload crates and military equipment.
The squaddies averted their eyes when Hunter walked by. Laura thought how lonely he looked, though he hid it well behind the cocky, rakish facade that irritated as many people as it charmed. She didn’t like that; they were too much alike.
Stamping her boots in the snow, she half-considered folding a chunk of ice into snow to throw at Tom, but the cold was eating its way into her bones despite the Arctic gear Hunter had procured for them from the quartermaster.
‘You know my flawless complexion is going to look as if someone’s been at it with a wire brush in about five minutes,’ she said. ‘That’s not a good look.’
‘Better get used to it.’ Hunter scanned the desolate airfield; no other planes were visible. ‘With the wind-chill factor, temperatures drop to minus thirty. Touch any metal and you’ll leave flesh behind.’
‘I bet you like it. Prove what a big man you are by taking the pain.’
‘Nothing to prove there.’
‘Run along now. Catch us a caribou or whatever it is you do. I’m very hungry.’
‘Can we get a move on?’ Tom said irritably. ‘While you two carry out your little dance of sexual attraction, the rest of us are slowly going numb.’
‘We’d never be able to tell the difference with you, old man.’ Laura looked past the small, run-down terminal buildings to the wall of white. ‘You could have brought us somewhere where there was, you know, actual life.’
‘We’re in Oppland, north of Bergen and Oslo, south of Trondheim, about an hour outside Dombas.’ Hunter struck out for the terminal, head bowed against the howling wind. ‘Back during the Cold War, this was considered a major NATO line of defence against a possible Russian invasion. And, yeah, you’re right, Tom – let’s get somewhere warm to make plans.’
2
Night had fallen by the time they reached the hotel burning with light in the empty landscape. No other dwellings lay in sight, and even the road was lost beneath drifting snow. Stark black pines were the only contrast against the sweeping white plain.
The hotel was modern, glass and pine with roaring log fires for a traditional feel. It was clearly a venue for tourists exploring the high country, but it appeared to be almost deserted.
While Hunter ordered them food – reindeer steaks and rice and a vegetable stew for Laura – and bottles of beer, Shavi flirted briefly with the barman, a tall, muscular man in his early twenties with long brown hair and a shy demeanour. They made a connection that Shavi was determined to follow up later.
They consumed their meal at the comfy chairs in front of the fire, next to their unruly pile of parkas and boots.
‘Couldn’t we have stayed somewhere a bit more lively?’ Laura complained.
‘Depends if you want to still be alive in the morning,’ Tom snapped. ‘A ley line runs through here. It’ll buy you a little more time.’
